This… this is seriously incredible. I’ve watched it probably 10 times, now, and every single time, I cry. It’s so moving and so well put together. And that ending… the shot of Jodie Whittaker as the 13th Doctor while Capaldi’s Doctor says “just see me”…
I can’t really put into words why I love Doctor Who. This show is 54 years old, and it’s a mess of missing continuity, confusing timey-wimey stories, vague, often contradictory cannon, and more. I understand why many people who’ve never seen Doctor Who really aren’t interested in getting into it… that’s a very daunting task.
Believe me, I know.
Even allowing for the fact that you could really start at the beginning of any era… you could, honestly, start with Capaldi’s first episode Deep Breath. Or you could start with Matt Smith’s first episode The Eleventh Hour. Or you could start with David Tennant’s first episode New Earth. Or you could start at the beginning of the 2005 return, Christopher Eccleston’s first episode Rose. You don’t necessarily have to start with An Unearthly Child (the very first episode of Doctor Who, aired on November 23, 1963). But the thing is, because Moffat (who took over as showrunner from Russel T. Davies in 2010) was so enamored with littering the show with nods and hints and such to the classic era and even to the previous era of the 2005 return, starting with Capaldi or even Matt Smith could get extremely confusing.
You could also, potentially, start with Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor, in August of 2018. Chris Chibnall is taking over from Steven Moffat, and he’s basically cleaning house and starting from scratch. So, potentially, the new series is a soft reboot of the show, so it’d probably be easy to start there.
But then there’s the daunting task of somehow figuring out the classic era, made that much harder by Hartnell’s and Troughton’s many missing episodes.
So yeah… I know that getting in to Doctor Who can be… uh… a lot… Doctor Who can also be and has been problematic in many ways, as well.
However…
For me, it truly is the greatest show on television. In fact, I’d argue that it’s the great media franchise. Even the terrible stories are told really well, and through its ups and downs, I have been engaged all the way through… even when they tried to claim that the moon is an egg.
THE MOON IS NOT AN EGG!!!!
*ehem*
Sorry…
I love Doctor Who so much, and the video I want to share with y’all now really encapsulates why. The show is all about change. That’s the whole point.
And this really drives that home.
Make sure you have some tissues on hand, and please… enjoy…
Wow! That is great.
Perhaps slightly worryingly, I recognised every episode & short those clips were from (albeit I cannot recite all of those episode / short names). It did include every doctor, albeit is a bit light on the pre-Eccleston era.
And yeah, the utterly unnecessary errors in Kill the Moon resulted in an extremely embarrassing-bad story, perhaps the worse (story-wise) of the current Eccleston-and-later era?
Oh, that is gorgeous.
I’ll be interested to see if Chibnall does a “just see me” sequence. I got the impression Moffatt et al were just a little worried about the Doctor regenerating into an old dude after two fairly pretty young chaps. The timey-wimey “see me” conversation complete with Matt Smith cameo was an unprecedented bit of hand-holding in the history of a show that had, until that point, pretty much just said “Here’s the new bloke, like it or lump it”.
I started my wife on Rose, skipped what I judged to be the less essential episodes (she is never seeing Love and Monsters) and acted as a sort of fan commentary whenever she hit “pause” for an explanation of something. Once she was properly hooked (about 20 minutes into Rose, if I recall), I injected some classic Tom Baker. Dalek was followed up with Genesis of the Daleks, for instance. What stands out (to her) about the old shows is not really the paucity of the effects, but the glacial pace compared to the frenetic sprint of modern television. She’s now at least as big a fan as me. The bluetooth speaker in the shape of the TARDIS in our house is hers, not mine, for instance.
If you haven’t already seen it, this “trailer” for the end of Tennant’s era is a corker, if only for the prominent part taken by actual national treasure Bernard Cribbins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y808u8njLgM
Beautiful. Powerful and sad. Thank you.
The Doctor dies. Then comes back and fights again -- the same man but different. Every time. Kind, heroic, wise. Things the world needs more of and a champion too. Despite it all. Making cosmos better by thought and by kindness.
Person -- not man -person -- individual.
Gender doesn’t matter. Words and actions do.